


Who's Afraid of the Dark?

by NevillesGran



Series: Project: SSCAIA - Pre-Fic [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Original Character Death(s), Supernatural Elements, extreme creepiness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-28
Updated: 2015-03-28
Packaged: 2018-03-20 00:25:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3629790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NevillesGran/pseuds/NevillesGran
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>About a year after graduating college, Roxy is kidnapped by cultists looking to summon the Eldest Gods to the mortal plane. That was their first mistake.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Who's Afraid of the Dark?

Roxy knew she was drugged pretty much as soon as she woke up. It took a moment—everything was hazy and floaty in her head, not really conducive to clear thought. But she was no stranger to hazy thoughts, and this was neither drunk brain nor hungover brain.

It couldn’t be anything supernatural, either—she was too relaxed into the shadows at the back of her mind for anything to touch her. Much too relaxed. But she let her mind fade a little further, just to be sure, and everything got even cloudier. The drug was pushing her even deeper than she intended. She rode the stab of panic back to the world of light. She was comforted by the fear, and by the feeling of comfort itself. As long as she could still feel like that, she wasn’t too far gone.

But it was one thing to be psychically clear-headed and other to be chemically, and she was definitely not the latter. Or even the former, not really, but when was she ever? It was dark with her eyes closed, and Roxy thought she would do well by some real light, but she wasn’t sure she wanted anyone to know she was even a little bit awake. She was lying on a mattress and there were warm blankets over her but there was too much space on either side for it to be her own single twin bed, and no cat trying to use her face as a pillow and/or food source. At home, there would have been at least three.

She felt sort of like a cat right now, all fuzzy and somnolent. Roxy loved her cats. She wasn’t even sure how many she technically owned; she just fed any who showed up at her door. She hoped Dirk would remember to feed them if she wasn’t there…

Dirk. Was Dirk here, too? Not on this bed, at least. Though maybe her kidnappers just valued propriety like that.

Definitely kidnappers though, not a deal gone south. She was too comfortable, and anyway, they hadn’t done business with anyone that shady in at least a couple weeks. The last thing she remembered was— was— outside the apartment? She’d gone out for something stupid like a candy bar, unafraid of the dark Boston streets because there were few things in the city that could take her in a real fight.

She must have shifted without thinking about it, feeling around for anything familiar, because there was a rustling of cloth at her side and a cool hand pressed against her cheek. Gently. What sort of kidnapping was this?

Roxy recoiled from the touch, eyes snapping open. At least, she tried to. She more sort of leaned away, moaning, eyelashes unfolding so slowly they might as well have been superglued together. Nothing came into focus, though some things were definite: this is not a hand she knew, nor room, nor looming man who turned and called to someone out of view, “The Vessel is waking. Tell the Archmaster.”

Oh, _that_ sort of kidnapping.

.                         

It started when they were thirteen, when Rose came home from the library with a book from the basement archives titled _Dē obscūrātī_. That wasn’t strange in and of itself: Rose spent half her life in the local library, and was always bringing home moth-eaten tomes too thick to fit in her backpack. Roxy borrowed at least half of them. Rose’s taste tended to the creepy and psychological while Roxy preferred wizardly adventures with lots of romance on the side, but it would be a dark day when the twins couldn’t bond over a good fantasy novel.

_Dē obscūrātī_ was more like a religious text, mixed with a personal journal and a how-to guide written co-written by HP Lovecraft and a schizophrenic monk. The author alternated between praising the Dark Gods and considering whether he should burn first his writings and then himself. Rose said she had found it while browsing, but, later, Roxy would wonder if she had been pushed towards it even then. The book was only the trigger, after all.

They had a great time for a couple years, translating the text (Roxy naturally picked languages up faster but Rose was much more determined to crack the Latin,) then, once they were sure of what they were doing, sketching pentacles and runes on the garage floor and turning shadows solid, slipping through them like teleportation, even raising the minor dead. Their cat, Jaspers, died of old age, and they brought him back before Mom even knew.

It was easy, much easier than _Dē obscūrātī_ described. Sometimes it felt like they didn’t even need the old spells, could have done everything with thought and will and shadow alone. Rose’s sleep grew restless and Roxy got chills even in direct sunlight, but they were doing magic and it was _fun_. They still didn’t hang out much in school—Rose was academic to the core while Roxy had a little thing she liked to call a social life—but come nightfall, they’d both be blowing off homework to kneel in the garage, identical blonde heads bent over chalk diagrams and candles and ancient Latin text. There was even a prophecy, like in all the best books, about someone whose “soul will be made a door” to the Void of the Eldest Gods. Only then would the world survive…something unspecified. There was a ritual involved. With no date attached, Rose liked to theorize about whom in history it might have been, from John Dee to DB Cooper. Or someone in the future, obviously, as eldritch abominations hadn’t overrun the world in either the mid-sixteenth century or 1971.

They didn’t think much else of it, though. The description of the Fated didn’t sound like either of them—Roxy could practically turn invisible in shadows, settle into them like a soft bed, and Rose heard voices sometimes, whispering forbidden knowledge in slithering, shattering tongues that she somehow understood. But the “one who must be split” was supposed to be able to do so much more. The Lalondes just figured they had a particular affinity for the dark arts.

They hadn’t translated the text entirely correctly.

.                           

The Archmaster was a thin, balding man in his early fifties. Like the rest of the cultists, he wore black, monkish robes with hems cut and coiled like tentacles. He was the only one with jewelry though, a winking pendant of amethyst and onyx twisted together in an Escheresque orb. Otherwise, he looked like someone Roxy might see buying a newspaper at a corner store.

“Allow me to apologize again for the uncivil manner in which you were brought here, Mistress,” he murmured as he handed her a cup of tea. “We meant neither to offend nor harm, but we did not want to attract the notice of any mundane authorities. Nor did we realize you already knew your purpose.”

Roxy, propped up against a small stack of luxurious pillows, tried not to look grateful as she accepted the drink, nor completely freaked out at his words. She sniffed the tea carefully before she took a sip, leery of more sedatives. It smelled like fresh peppermint, warm and welcome.

“How could I not know my own destiny?” she asked, aiming for the condescending tone of her least favorite parallel programming professor from college. She’d never been good at patronizing; it came out too arch, more like Dirk sarcastically reading YouTube comments aloud. Good enough.

Dirk would be on her trail by now. She was starting to feel genuinely well-rested as the drugs wore off, so she must have been missing for at least an entire night. She hoped he didn’t hurt anyone too fatally. Roxy was never as comfortable with murder as her partner, even if the other guys tried to kill them first. It was an occupational hazard for dealers in the supernatural black market, and she did enjoy her job, but that didn’t mean she had to like all of it.

She drank her tea slowly to hide her thoughts. They were speeding up, but she still wasn’t up to her usual standards of bullshitting skill.

“When does the ritual begin?” she asked.

“In one hour, Mistress,” the Archmaster replied obsequiously. “When the moon is at its darkest zenith.”

Of course. Everything was always as dark as possible with the Horrorterrors. Swear by them all you liked—and Roxy still did sometimes—but imaginative they were not.

That wasn’t much time. It had been over twenty-four hours but Plan: Wait for Backup was clearly in jeopardy. Time for Plan: Stealth Ninja instead. Dirk could catch up whenever.

Roxy put her cup on the bedside table and pushed herself into a more upright position. “In that case, might I request a chance to use the commode?” She coughed delicately into one hand, the picture of a finely bred young lady with absolutely no escape plans.

“Of course.” He rose and beckoned to one of the cowled cultists by the door, a woman. “Take the Vessel to powder her nose,” he commanded. (How old _was_ this guy?) “I must attend to arrangements for the summoning.”

The guard bowed. The Archmaster bent over the bed to take Roxy’s hand and press it to his lips. “I will see you soon, Mistress,” he promised. “And our true masters will return to engulf the Earth in darkness once more.” His eyes were full of something dark and fey.

Roxy managed a tight smile. “As they should.”

He left.

The cultist helped Roxy to her feet. She was still a little unsteady, that was bad. But she found her feet and stopped leaning on his arm by the time they rounded the bed (only thing in the room, really) and reached the other guard at the door.

“This way, Mistress,” said the woman, nudging her to the right. Both fell in behind her. The hallway was dark, darker even than the dim bedroom, and the cement under her socked feet was cold. Definitely underground. She hoped they were still in Massachusetts, at least.

The hall—tunnel, really—forked again just a couple yards down. Roxy glanced back at her companions.

“Left, Mistress,” said the one who hadn’t spoken yet.

Roxy walked just far enough into the intersection to see that tunnel had a dead end, though she had no way of knowing how the couple rooms she could see might connect to one another. To the right, there were more rooms and then the tunnel veered right.

“Got it,” she said, turning obligingly left. Then she sucked in her breath (it only helped psychologically but that counted), turned inward to the hole in the heart of her being that led directly to the Void, and slipped down just far enough to fade out of sight. Invisible, she spun on one heel and sprinted down the righthand corridor, falling just a little further into the Horrorterrors’ domain to keep her footsteps muffled. Even with the sedatives still not entirely worn off, she barely had to think about it—Roxy had once broken into a high-security vault owned by a literal vampire on Wall Street; a subterranean cult complex wouldn’t be much of a challenge.

She was just around the corner when someone grabbed her arm. Momentum spun her around; she used it to punch her captor in the jaw and take off running again.

This time someone tripped her. She saw the staff coming at her legs, faded farther in to ghost through it rather than break her stride, and still it slammed her squarely in the shin. She rolled and came up swinging, invisibility dropped, but the guards were waiting for her. Moving faster than human, each wrenched one arm up behind her back, and she couldn’t slip away. She tried, going as deep as she dared, stifling her fear and anger to sink out of substantiality. Her arms turned as intangible as the air and back. But the cultists matched her perfectly. Shit, _real_ devotees.

The Archmaster frowned in front of her, idly swinging his staff. “I thought you understood, Mistress,” he sighed. “It may not matter to the Dark Ones, but I thought…” He shook his head, lips thin, and pulled something out of his robes. A syringe. “They will come anyway, and devour the world. You will bear the honor and we will be blessed.”

Roxy tried to twist away as he approached and put the needle to her neck, but it was no use. Darkness, the boring, unconscious version, filled her mind again. Dick. She could have told him he was wrong.

.                           

Mom got sick when they were sixteen, and the dark arts were put on hold so the Lalondes could focus on stomach cancer and how to cure it. The Eldest Gods were beings of death, not healing.

There had never been a dad in the picture, nor any other family really, so they had to get a live-in for when Mom was too sick from chemo to take care of herself. It wasn’t often, at first—Mom was tough, like a steel bar in curls and a chic lab coat. She didn’t let her girls skip school just because she needed someone to bring her an orange juice.

Roxy and Rose ignored her admonitions at least half the time, alternating days so _someone_ always got the homework. If they acted, few teachers could tell them apart anyway.

Mom’s neat blonde curls were replaced by a purple knit cap from Rose, and she wore pajamas more often than anything. But they slipped into a rhythm, treatment, downtime, better again, repeat, and the better got better (though the downtime got worse; chemotherapy effects were cumulative) and the doctors smiled as the twins wheeled their mom in and out of the hospital.

Then it got into her spine, too, and it turned out there was no effective medicinal treatment for that. And it acted fast.

The Eldest were not healing gods, but Rose laid out the chalk lines and candles, slit the throat of a neighbor’s dog for sacrifice and mixed it with her own blood in the garage in the dark, crying a combination of Latin and eldritch tongues. Roxy wasn’t there; she was at the hospital, holding Mom’s hand and trying not to notice how pale she was.

Rose was paler when she strode in, practically gray. Not with sickness, though; shadows crawled under her skin and oozed out into the air around her. Her eyes shone black all the way through, her hair was stark white, and there was blood on her hands.

“What did you _do_ ,” Roxy had gasped, springing to her feet.

Rose hissed something unintelligible, raised one wand—a repurposed knitting needle, now sizzling with black fire—and flung her sister against a heart monitor. No nurses came running.

Roxy could never clearly remember what happened next. Blasting black light from Rose’s wands, filling the room. Struggling in against shadows from that writhed like devouring tentacles around her sister and mother. Cold skin and screams like gargling daggers. Something broke inside her, caved in, split open; everything was black and cold and empty and she gasped for air and shadows flew in, smothering, calming, cooling.

When a doctor meandered in, the room was light again and Rose was sobbing in Roxy’s arms on the floor, while Roxy muffled her tears in Rose’s hair and Mom lay unmoving on the bed. Unbreathing.

They didn’t talk about it. Roxy would have, but Rose refused to look at her. They negotiated moving in with a distant aunt for their last year before college, and Roxy cleaned the garage alone. She threw out the chalk and the candles, buried what remained of the dog (mostly just bones), and finally burned _Dē obscūrātī._ She was pretty sure she imagined the screams as it went up in smoke.

They kept not talking, about most things. It was easier once they were on opposite sides of the country, Roxy at MIT and Rose at UCLA. Rose threw herself into mundane, human studies, taking sleeping pills to avoid the whispers and generally pretending the supernatural didn’t exist. Roxy had decided she never wanted to be caught by surprise like that again, and leaned on alcohol to keep her lively while she experimented with coding during the day and fading into the shadows at night. No rituals, just will and verve versus the Void. Rose was getting her PhD in psychology now, and Roxy had graduated with a chance-met partner and a skillset perfect for high-stakes crime. They hadn’t spoken since last Christmas.

.                             

Roxy couldn’t think about that right now. She was only half awake, chained upright to some sort of throne while the devotees of the Eldest Gods chanted in the dim candlelight around her, words that sounded like they were being strangled out. She needed happy thoughts, bright feelings, anger even—not despair or fear or loss, not any emotion that would urge her to give in and give up and fall into the waiting embrace of the Horrorterrors. She needed lifelines.

Kittens, she thought desperately. Her mind wasn’t clouded so much as mired in shadow, thoughts floating loose and hidden, hiding, sliding into the black hole at her center. A rush of affection for cute kittens, and more for her wayward, half-owned cats, lean, grey Jerry and elegant Ophelia and chubby, long-haired Bernice. Jaspers, so sweet, always cuddling on her lap, before and after his death. That had been _exhilarating_ , standing across the circle from Rose, arms raised and eyes burning and dark. So right and free, all she had to do was go back, let go. They would welcome her…

The chanting was lulling, the drugs and incense numbing, and the Void sucked at her like a deep ocean current. It wouldn’t harm anyone else if she slipped away, let her soul cave in on itself and be engulfed by the Gods. Rose could let them loose on the world (Roxy didn’t blame her for suppressing everything, with that knowledge) but Roxy was safe, only had herself to loose, she could give up and nothing would happen…

_Dirk_ , she thought fiercely, clinging to hope and love and sheer bloody-mindedness if that was what she needed to get out of this. No one did bloody-mindedness like Dirk, with bright gold eyes and a sword as unbreakable as his spine and a stubborn conviction that he knew best and could do everything himself. They’d met in a bar Roxy’s sophomore year. She’d been making out with a frat boy (that was a good memory too, pleasure and touch) and Dirk had strolled in and used what she later learned was a semi-demonic mind-control voice to force them out so he could have a PDA-free drink. Roxy had ditched the frat boy outside, let her mind fade just far enough to fend of psychic attacks, and gone back and intangiblized his hand into the table until he explained himself. Start of a beautiful partnership. She was sort of completely in love with him, but he was gay so friendship and badass in-syncitude were fine. (It would never work.) (It had _so far_ and she was _not_ giving up.) Together, they’d gotten out of much worse scrapes than this. (Not really.)

There was a commotion by the door. Two dark figures entered, carrying a third dressed in jeans and a ragged t-shirt. Another cultist followed with a katana over one shoulder. Dirk’s hands and feet were tied his shirt was splattered with blood, at least half of it his. Still he jerked when he saw Roxy, kicked at the guard holding his feet and tried to shout something through his gag. She could only stare in dismay.

The Archmaster left his place in the circle, waving at the others to continue chanting. They were speeding up now but it was still lulling, drawing Roxy in until she ached. She wanted it to stop. She hadn’t been this stretched open since she’d pulled back the Gods Rose had let in (and see how that went) and she was clinging to the edges of herself but they were waiting, calling dragging like a sinkhole to the depths of nowhere. Some dark flickers rushed past her, bits of power gifted to their acolytes here, but it wasn’t enough. It would never be enough.

She couldn’t hear what the Archmaster was saying to the guards. The one holding Dirk’s katana hit Dirk on the head with it when he kept struggling, and he went limp. The other two took the opportunity to drop him on the floor. The Archmaster bent down and used one long finger to sketch a sign in the blood on his chest. Roxy couldn’t quite see (it was dark, she couldn’t move, there was no use) but from his movements, she thought she recognized the sigil that marked those meant for sacrifice. The Gods’ first treat when they entered the mortal plane through the portal of her soul.

She held to the vindictive satisfaction that _that_ wouldn’t happen at least. Wrong Lalonde twin, suckers. “Must be split,” yeah, like an embryo splitting into identical twins, each with a one-way door in her soul. She wondered if these cultists even knew.

The Archmaster returned to the group and the chanting picked up the pace again, racing towards a climax. Roxy didn’t have any options left; she was trapped and Dirk was trapped and there was no one else, no one but the waiting abominations in the Void which some called Gods. It was so hard to keep fighting, day in and day out, drinking for an excuse to be exuberant when cheer was nothing but fizz on the surface. She had a BA in Computer Engineering from MIT and she was living in an apartment with a man who’d never love her and some number of cats, stealing at night and scraping coding jobs in the day. What was the point. It would be so much easier to give in, fall back and lose herself in the shadows and cool coils of the Gods. She could almost see them in the dark…

The chanting stopped with a final shout. The cultists stood around her, arms raised in exultation. Roxy blinked.

She was still here?

She was _barely_ still here. She was almost translucent. But she _was_ , and the joy and triumph of it was enough to bring her back even more. The numbing chanting had stopped and the Horrorterrors were screaming behind her, inside her, cheated of even this much of a meal. Because she was still _here_.

The cultists were looking around in confusion. Some lowered their arms.

The Archmaster stared at her, mouth twisted in a grimace of disappointment. “She _must_ be the right one,” he said. “I have never felt Them so close as in her. How…”

Roxy head was still lolling but she grinned fierce and bright. Whatever Rose was doing to hide her connection to the Void, it was working like a charm, even if it meant not speaking to her sister. Roxy wasn’t dead, lost, or devoured, and Dirk would be back on his feet in a minute—he had a hard head and they’d only left one guard on him. They were going to get out of this.

“We can search again, sir,” said one of the priests. “We will search to the ends of the Earth, until the end of time.”

“No,” said the Archmaster, eyes narrowed. He stepped forward and cupped Roxy’s chin in one hand, turning her face back and forth as if looking for something in face. In her eyes, or under her skin. “Even if she were an imperfect vessel, the Gods should have answered our call. She must be the antithesis. The Banisher.”

Roxy stiffened, but he had already dropped her, was turning back to his followers. “They will be linked. We will use her to find the True Vessel, and then we will kill her to preserve the Gods once they return.”

No. No no no. The cultists bowed, all averting their eyes from Roxy as if she were poison. One approached her chair, holding another syringe—where did they get all this stuff? No. She didn’t want to die, duh, or be drugged again—she was only just coming out of it again—but this was so much worse. They were going to go after Rose. They were going to _use her_ to go after Rose, Rosie-rose, her Rosie. Her twin, with bright blond hair and a clear laugh on the beach when they were six, awful goth makeup and dusty old books when they were twelve, black eyes and grey skin and an aura of burning shadow when they were seventeen. With cropped hair and cool stares and barely disguised distaste now that they were nearly twenty-four and hadn’t talked in a year and a half. Mom had never made them promise to look out for each other but they had anyway. _Her_ _Rosie_. She’d given up everything to get away from this life, including her twin sister; Roxy was still trying to be okay with it—and they would drag her back for their _petty, hungry Gods—_

And Roxy couldn’t stop them, couldn’t fight them and the pull of the Gods all at once. Maybe _with_ Rose, but that would never happen again.

She took a deep breath, settled her thoughts as the cultist brought the needle to her chained arm, and let go.

It was so _easy_. The Void welcomed her like an old friend. The Eldest Gods growled for her but she promised them a short wait and stayed to the edges, the shadows between the mortal plane and the dark. She dissolved into them, became them, cool and dark and untouchable, engulfed and engulfing.

With the pure blackness of the Void at her back and in her heart, the unlit underground room shone as if bathed in sunlight. How painful for her devotees! She drew them in like children to a mother’s arms, wrapping them in shadows and leading them gently through herself into the Void. She was a door, she had always been a door.

“What did you think would happen, if you had gotten my sister and summoned your masters?” Her whisper echoed out of the shadows as they wrapped around the Archmaster, dragging him down to the gluttonous embrace of his Gods. There was no vengeance in it, nor love, just cold. Emotion was a mortal encumbrance. The Void of the Dark Gods was limitless but empty, vacuum, held only hunger embodied by the Eldest. “They and she would have been much less kind in this world.”

It was so fast, so simple. They barely even screamed. In a matter of minutes, the entire compound was empty but for darkness and, in this room, the one young man with blood on his shirt. He was back on his feet now, katana retrieved from where a vanishing priest dropped it. Her work was done. Time to follow her priests into the dark; give up, give in, sink down and finally rest. It had been so long…

"Roxy?"

The young man stared around the room, the whites of his eyes shining in the dark. He had been all spitfire when they brought him in, bound and gagged but tense, ready, eyes blazing. Now he was tense again but with shoulders hunched, and knuckles white where they gripped his sword. Scared.

She didn’t care, barely remembered the sensation. Fear was for mortals, for the living. She was neither, fading even from the shadows in the room. The Void beckoned, peace at last, and the Dark Gods—

No, Dirk shouldn't be scared, that wasn’t a thing that Dirk should be. Dirk was _never_ scared, not in a way that he let show. And only of things like relaxing and hugs and admitting he might be wrong. Not of anything supernatural. Not of _her._

Roxy fell out of the shadows, body and mind and soul coming together with an almost audible snap. Dirk dropped his sword to catch her and they sank to the floor.

“I had to,” she sobbed. “I had to, I’m sorry, I had to. They were going to go after Rose and I had to—”

Dirk stroked her hair. "It's okay. I know, it’s okay. I'm here, you're here, and we're safe."

It was nonsense and cheesy and Roxy cried because it was real and true; she was here with chill in her bones and shadows fading back into a hole in her soul, but Dirk was here too, warm, solid arms around her, and Rose was safe far away and blissfully, deliberately ignorant of it all. That was—that was okay, for now. Enough to keep the dark away for another night.

**Author's Note:**

> Bonus line from about ten minutes later: “You didn’t feed the cats?!”


End file.
